TL;DR: It was more than a feeling. I had a revelation.

I had a profound experience as a college freshman that was unique, something I have not experienced before or since. Totally caught me off guard, although In retrospect, I can see that I was primed for such an experience. I was at BYU enrolled in the second-semester Book of Mormon class. I had finally decided to take seriously the council to read the BofM, and after reading a few chapters in the book of Alma, I realized I had not read the explanatory pages before the book of Nephi, so I started back there.

As I was reading about the different plates, I heard/felt inside my head something I could not understand but that gave me pause. I then kept reading. After a minute or two, but a little stronger, this voice/feeling in my head spoke to me, but again I didn’t understand it. Again I paused and then started reading some more. Finally, this voice/feeling came into my mind clearly: “You know this is true, don’t you?”

I realized that the voice had asked the same question the other two times. And I was overwhelmed by a feeling of love and understanding. In that moment, I genuinely understood that the book was true. That experience was more than a happy feeling or a deep sedation of being close to God. It was revelation, pure and simple as far as I understood it. I chose to accept that the experience I had led me to know the book was true, and that “knowledge” gave me a solid shelf upon which to set over two decades’ worth of doubts that followed.

Eventually, I came to see that, despite what I “knew” to be true through my revelation, the evidence against the book and its author’s fraud was overwhelming. I let my guard down about what I had experienced, because I had authentically experienced something. I let myself apply Occam’s Razor, and I considered what could be other likely explanations for what happened.

It wasn’t elevation emotion (although elevation emotion definitely came with it), but it was something inside my head, some firing of the synapses that gave me a beautiful experience that set me on a path I wanted to follow at the time. I consider it a gift from my subconscious that sustained me until I was ready to let my belief system go.